Caterpillar Inc. of Peoria, Ill., manufactures off-road mining mobile machines. For example, the Caterpillar 777C is an off-road mining truck. In commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,390,125, Kyrtsos et al disclose an autonomous mobile machine system for use with a mining mobile machine such as the 777C truck. Such an autonomous mobile machine system may be used, for example, to implement an autonomous mining operation. For example, a plurality of autonomous dump trucks can haul rock from an excavation site to a crusher site in an open pit mining operation.
In addition, in commonly owned U.S. Pat. No. 5,586,030, Kemner et al disclose a system using a queuing technique to manage a single input, fixed position resource such as a wheel loader.
In such a mining system, resources such as intersections must be shared by a plurality of mobile machines. It is desired to manage the mobile machines and the resources so that operation of the mining system is optimized. This invention addresses the management of resources having multiple inputs, or entry points. For effective management of the resource, each entry point will require its own queue. For example, an intersection has at least one entry point and at least one exit point. Each entry point of the intersection requires a queue. Each queue must be appropriately managed, and all the queues for the intersection must be managed as a whole to effectively manage access to the intersection.
The present invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.